Bibliotrek

I keep see­ing arti­cles about the “return on invest­ment” of a col­lege edu­ca­tion. The lat­est one warns that a col­lege degree won’t return your invest­ment! Or it will, but you’ll only make $400,000 more than a high school grad­u­ate over 30 years, instead of $1.2 mil­lion more, unless you are lucky enough to be pay­ing back stu­dent loan debt from your time at one of the ritzi­est schools in the country:

The top of the list was dom­i­nated by élite pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties, with the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy tak­ing the top spot. Its net 30-year ROI of nearly $1.7 mil­lion makes it the most valu­able under­grad­u­ate degree in the nation.

Busi­ness types can get as snooty with me as they want, but the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of col­lege edu­ca­tion in the US enrages me. Col­leges are not cor­po­ra­tions. Edu­ca­tion is not a prod­uct to be bought and sold and traded. I know many peo­ple would be a lot hap­pier if it were just the pur­chase of a diploma, some­thing as inert as pur­chas­ing a set of ency­clo­pe­dias. It would require a hell of a lot less effort and dis­com­fort. But that mind­set misses the entire point of education.

Edu­ca­tion isn’t a prod­uct because it’s about per­sonal growth. Our grand­par­ents don’t become mature and wise by pur­chas­ing things. A per­son gains matu­rity and wis­dom through expe­ri­ence, through lov­ing and los­ing and griev­ing and enjoy­ing. Like­wise, a col­lege edu­ca­tion pro­vides par­tic­u­lar kinds of men­tal experience.

Going to col­lege means more than drink­ing your way through your first years of inde­pen­dent life and walk­ing away with thou­sands of dol­lars in debt and a mag­i­cal piece of paper that show­ers money on you. Col­lege isn’t about “invest­ment,” at least not in the strictly mon­e­tary sense. The whole point of spend­ing all that money on tuition, and not stick­ing it in some high-yield finan­cial invest­ment, is to improve your­self: to learn to think, to engage on a higher level with the world around you, to crit­i­cally eval­u­ate evi­dence, to become a bet­ter and smarter per­son because of your years of being men­tally challenged.

At the best schools, you can also form and take advan­tage of the social net­works that can help you suc­ceed (and that, I sus­pect, largely leads to the $1.2 mil­lion dif­fer­ence between those col­lege grad­u­ates and peo­ple with a high school diploma). But you don’t have to join the Ivy League net­work of good old boys to ben­e­fit from an Ivy League edu­ca­tion, and a com­mu­nity col­lege edu­ca­tion can still make you a smarter and more well-rounded person.

The real “return on invest­ment” of a col­lege edu­ca­tion can­not be mea­sured in dol­lars and cents — or, at least, not directly. If col­lege grad­u­ates make more money, it’s because even the most cyn­i­cal employ­ers see a col­lege degree as evi­dence of men­tal invest­ment, of the devel­op­ment of skills and abil­i­ties, of the abil­ity to com­plete tasks and accom­plish goals, of train­ing in diverse fields by peo­ple who are very very good at what they do, whether that’s chem­istry or anthro­pol­ogy or his­tory or art. We live in an increas­ingly com­plex world, and col­lege teaches peo­ple to think in more com­plex ways, to nego­ti­ate more com­plex inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships, and to grap­ple with more com­plex issues.

And these things mat­ter more than money does.